He cleared his throat. “I haven’t actually asked anyone out yet.”
His nerves about women were actually kind of cute. “No? Why not?”
“I’m just testing things out for now,” he said. “I’ve only been using the app for a few weeks.”
“Yeah? But you like it?”
“I mean, my boss developed it. I work for The Web Developer now. That’s why I was on the cruise.”
“That’s right.” Iris finished with her coconut, her stomach starting to rebel at all the sweet starch. She leaned against the tree trunk behind her and watched Justin. A body as big and buff as his would need more than coconuts. “Tell me who you’ve been talking to on the app.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “A couple of people. I’m honestly not on my phone that much.”
“Ivy’s been messaging a guy called Frogman.” Iris giggled, the name still funny to her. “I think it’s kind of weird that anyone can assume any name. She doesn’t even know who he is.”
Justin slowly lifted his eyes to hers. “Frogman?”
“Yeah,” Iris said, noting the sparks in his eyes. She leaned toward him, trying to decipher his expression.
“Is your sister PoisonedApple?”
Iris didn’t know what to say.
Justin started to chuckle, shaking his head as he went back to his coconut shell. “What are the odds of that?”
“You know her?” Iris’s voice was barely more than a whisper. This really was a nightmare. A living nightmare. Her twin sister had been chatting it up with Justin, and now she was stranded with him on a deserted island.
And crushing on him. Hard.
“We’ve been chatting,” he said. “I haven’t asked her out.”
“Do you want to ask her out?” Iris didn’t mean to practically yell the words.
Justin looked at her, a perfect storm moving across his face. “Honestly? Yeah, eventually, I would’ve probably asked her out.”
Iris felt like crying, and she didn’t even know why. She’d spent a couple of nights with this guy, and she barely knew him. So he was attractive. He had a bark and probably a bite, and all she had to do was survive this island and get back to her real life.
She stood up, her stomach sloshing now for an entirely new reason. “Excuse me.”
“Iris,” he called after her, but she just kept walking. Back at the shelter, she grabbed her phone from the hip pack and walked along the edge of the trees. Her phone had no service, but it had a charge, and she typed out a journal entry in her note app, hoping it would bleed away the negativity brewing within her.
Leave it to me to have feelings for a man my sister is already messaging…
Chapter Six
Justin wanted to go after Iris, but he also wanted more than coconut to eat. He sighed, because the woman could move fast when she wanted to.
The truth was, he’d started to think maybe he and Iris could have something. Yes, he’d been messaging her sister—but he hadn’t known that. He hadn’t asked her out.
“But she wanted you to,” he muttered as he piled as many coconuts into his arms as he could carry. He took them back to the shelter and lined them up on the platform. “And you should’ve lied,” he scolded himself. “Told her, ‘of course I don’t want to ask out your twin sister.’ Jeez.” He scanned for Iris afterward. He couldn’t see her, which was good. Sort of.
At least it meant she’d stayed in the shade, out of the sun. The water filtration system still sat in the sun, and he checked it to find a couple of cups of water already accumulated. Also good.
He’d find more food and find something to put the drinkable water in, and then he’d make more. That would be a task they’d have to constantly be on top of, but hey, it gave him something to do.
In Justin’s opinion, there was nothing worse than being idle. Having nothing to do. “Iris?” he called, and he heard her say, “Over here,” to his right.
He went that way, scanning the forest for her. After only a minute, he found her sitting in the sand, her back against a tree, tapping on her phone.
“Hey,” he said softly, the way he would to a scared animal he wanted to coax over to him. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“Sure,” she said brightly, as if she hadn’t just told him he’d been flirting with her sister through a dating app.
“I’m going to go look for more fruit,” he said. “I could use the help.”
“All right.” She got up, stuffed her phone in her back pocket, and brushed off her shorts. “Let’s go.”
He stepped, and she did too, and Justin deliberately reached over and took her hand in his. Iris stilled, and then tried to pull her hand away.
“I’m not going to ask your sister out,” he said, fixing his eyes on her and begging silently that she’d look at him.
Whether it was the weight of his stare or her own curiosity, it didn’t matter. She looked at him. “Yeah? Why not?”
“Because I’m sort of interested in someone else.”
“Another woman on your app?” Her eyes threw flames at him, and Justin found he wanted to get burned by her.
“A woman I met on a cruise,” he said, a smile spreading across his face. “She asks sort of blunt questions, but she’s pretty, and I like talking to her.”
Iris blinked, pure shock flowing across her fair features now. He reached over with his free hand and tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’m talking about you, by the way.”
“You think I’m pretty?”
“See what I mean about the blunt questions?” He shook his head, tugged on her hand to get her walking again, and said, “Yes, Iris. I think you’re pretty.” The blonde hair, the freckles splashed across her cheeks, the curve in her hips. What wasn’t to like?
She squeezed his hand, and he took that as her saying, I think you’re handsome, or something. He wasn’t sure if Iris would actually call him handsome. Good-looking? Hot? Either way, she was interested in him too.
They walked through the trees, finding more coconuts. “There has to be mango or banana or something on this island,” he said. He’d tried a plethora of fruits since living in Getaway Bay, and there had to be more here than coconuts.
Up the swell they went, and back down the other side. “Over there,” Iris said, and she let go of his hand to veer right.
“What is it?” he asked as she started jogging toward a squatty tree that looked like it had flat cactus growing from it.
“Dragon fruit,” she said, turning back to him with triumph on her face. She picked the spiky, pink fruit and handed it to him. “They’re really good.”
“I’ve had dragon fruit,” he said. “Once or twice. I don’t eat the skin, right?”
“No,” she said. “You cut it open. Like a kiwi.”
He didn’t have a knife, so he dug his fingernails into the skin of the fruit and broke it open. The flesh was white, with black seeds throughout. He didn’t care what it looked like. It smelled like pears and honeydew, and he took a big bite. A groan of pleasure leaked through his lips. “This is great.”
She nodded, eating her way through her own dragon fruit. Once they finished, she pulled out the purple top of her pj’s. “Let’s load up as many as we can in this.”
“Genius.” He got to work picking as much of the fruit as they could carry. “We can come back for more later.”
“I think I see something else down there,” she said, peering further into the forest. “Should we check it out?”
“We have nothing else to do,” he said.
She laid their dragon fruit haul on the ground and led him past a few more trees to another type of tree. Almost a bust, really.
“I think this is rambutan,” she said. “My father had a tree like this in our backyard for a while. He hated it. Said it dropped too much fruit.”
“Too much fruit sounds amazing,” Justin said, reaching out to pick one of the small spheres. They were grouped in huge bunches, with tons of spiny things coming off
of them. No bigger than an egg, the fruit fit in the palm of his hand, and he tried to break it open the way he had the dragon fruit. But the skin came away easily, and he almost smashed the fruit inside.
“I’ve never had this,” he said, looking at Iris.
She squeezed her rambutan, and the flesh came popping right out of the pink skin. “It’s good,” she said, taking a bite of the pale flesh. Another bite, and the fruit was gone. “Try it.”
He did, getting the flavor of a red grape. “Mm.” He finished his. “Not as juicy as a grape. But good.” They were small enough, he could probably eat the whole tree by himself.
“Let’s take the dragon fruit back and come back for these,” she said. “It’ll give us a little variety, at least.”
He agreed, and they’d taken two steps when a crack sounded in the forest beyond them. They both froze as if in unison. “What was that?” Iris asked.
“I don’t know,” Justin whispered, searching the forest around him. It sounded like someone crashing through undergrowth, but there wasn’t much of that here. He took another step, hoping there weren’t rats or rabbits on this island. The creatures dominated the populated islands, as did birds, mongoose, and feral populations of donkeys, goats, and pigs.
He’d take a pig, but he thought it unlikely he’d find one out here. There had to be people to bring the pigs to the island in the first place, and he wasn’t sure a human had been on this island before.
“Come on,” he said, nodding to Iris like she was one of his SEAL teammates and she’d understand his nonverbal cues to move. She seemed to do just fine, and they made it back to the dragon fruit tree and the stash they’d been planning to take back.
He didn’t see anything. No prints. No evidence that anyone or anything had been there, except for them.
He scooped up the purple silk full of fruit and turned to her just as she said, “Justin.”
He didn’t need her to say anything else. “It’s a nene,” he said, staring at the native Hawaiian goose. They were rare, and he’d only seen one in the zoo. “Wow.”
“Maybe this island is part of its nesting grounds,” she whispered.
“Maybe,” he said. He didn’t think they needed to fear a goose, but he kept his eyes on it as they started back toward their shelter. The bird just stood there and watched them, and finally, Justin tuned his back on it and increased his pace.
Iris gave a shaky laugh. “I don’t know what I thought it was,” she said. “But I was thinking you know, Godzilla or something.”
Justin laughed with her, though he was also glad the noise had just been a goose. “Gotta be alert at all times, I guess.”
They dropped off their fruit and went back for the rambutan. The nene wasn’t to be found, and Iris made him go all the way to the other side of the island. “This place is tiny,” she said. “I bet we could walk the circumference of the whole thing in a couple of hours.”
“Probably,” he agreed.
When she met his eye, she wore worry on her face. “If it’s so small, how will anyone find us?”
He didn’t know, but he didn’t want to tell her that. So he said, “They’ll find us, Iris,” and hurried back to the shelter. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to be on this side of the island, where he could see the water where they’d come in.
Help would come from that direction, he was sure of it.
The next morning, he and Iris noshed on dragon fruit and rambutan. They set more ocean water to evaporate into drinking water in the filtration system, and he did take her hand and say, “Let’s see how long it takes us to walk the island.”
Less than two hours. They stayed under the trees, almost out in the sun. She found sea grapes in one spot, and he scaled the only banana tree they could find to get as much fruit from it as they could.
He kept his eyes peeled for anything they could use to boil water, but there was nothing. No pots. No shells. Nothing watertight that could withstand fire. Not that they had fire. But he could make it if he had to.
The sun kept them plenty warm during the day, and they kept each other warm at night. Justin was used to sleeping in horrible conditions, without a blanket for comfort. But Iris confessed she wasn’t, and he let her gripe about how the sand scratched her and how tight her sunburned skin was.
“Let’s make hats this afternoon,” he said. “And we’ll eat a couple of protein cookies, and things will be okay.”
She nodded, turned away from him, and sniffed. He let her have a moment to weep, because he knew how overwhelming a situation could be. They’d been on the island for just over twenty-four hours and away from the cruise ship for two whole days.
While she went to take care of her bathroom needs, he stood at the shelter and gazed at the ocean in front of him. It was huge. He was not. The island was not.
“How are they ever going to find us?” he whispered. “Please, Lord, help them find us.”
Chapter Seven
Iris wasn’t a religious person, but when she heard Justin’s plea to the Lord to help their rescuers find them, she added her own prayer to his.
He put on a really good front, she’d give him that. He was all assurances and reassurances. We have food. We have water. We’ll be okay.
And she’d believed him. It was easier than believing she was going to die on this island.
And at least she wasn’t alone.
“Okay,” she said, returning to the shelter and causing him to turn toward her. “I don’t know how to make a hat.” She looked at him expectantly, and he sat on the edge of the platform they’d built.
“I don’t either,” he said. “But we can start by weaving some fronds together. Something that will keep the sun off our faces and shoulders while we’re out working.”
She wasn’t sure what work they had to do. The island was providing enough food and water for them, and they didn’t have tools to build with. Could she really live her whole life on this platform? She couldn’t wear the same clothes forever. Could she?
She put the thoughts out of her mind. “Tell me about your family,” she said, needing a conversation to drive away the worry.
“I’m the oldest,” he said.
“Big shocker,” she teased, and he smiled.
“Two younger sisters. Star and Kaylee. My mother passed away a couple of years ago. Dad is dating someone new. They all live in North Carolina.”
“Everyone but you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I grew up near Fort Bragg there. Loved swimming and water polo in high school, and joined the Navy the first chance I got.” He grinned as if his time in the Navy had been the highlight of his life. Maybe it had been.
“That’s great,” she said.
“What about you?”
She told him about her two older sisters. Skimmed over Ivy, only saying she was older by four minutes, and said, “We grew up in Getaway Bay, and we all live there still.”
“You’re close to your family.”
“Yes,” she said, the word sticking in her throat. “Very.”
“My unit was like family to me,” he said, his voice somewhat cooler than it had been a moment ago. “I miss being part of something like that.” Justin rarely let her see a vulnerable side of him, and she paused in her useless weaving to look at him. He kept his eyes on his work, but she sensed a gentle soul inside the tough Navy man.
“You don’t see them anymore?”
“I retired,” he said. “I still see some of them, sure. But it’s not the same.” He flashed her a smile and went back to the leaves in front of him. “You like owning your own company?”
“It’s a lot of work,” she admitted, maybe for the first time.
“Sounds like you don’t like it.”
“I do,” she said, wishing her voice didn’t stray up an octave. “It’s just a lot of work. It’s kind of like how you said you didn’t have time for a girl in the Navy. That’s how I feel with We’ll Weed That.”
He nodded, and she noticed the w
ay he pressed his lips together, almost like he had something to say and was physically trying not to say it.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Justin.” She put her hand on his to get him to stop. “What?”
Their eyes met, and he looked angry. Actually angry. She pulled her hand back as if his skin had burned her.
“I guess I’m just wondering what we’re doing,” he said.
Confusion knotted her stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I told you I was interested in you, and now you’re telling me you don’t have time for anything but your business.”
“I told you I was married to it,” she said.
“I thought that was, you know, figurative.”
Iris didn’t know what to say. Did she have to work as much as she did? Probably not.
Definitely not, her mind whispered. But she didn’t exactly have a whole lot to go home to, and maybe it was easier to stay at work sometimes.
“Never mind,” he said, his voice on the harsh side now. “Thank you for telling me before things went too far.”
“Justin,” she said, but she didn’t know what else to add. Finally, she asked, “What would’ve been too far?”
“I don’t know. Kissing you.”
“Oh, so that’s not going to happen.” She didn’t phrase it as a question, and she threw a smile in his direction, not really checking to make sure he’d received it.
“I don’t—you want that to happen?”
“I’m not working right now,” she said. “I mean, besides this pathetic attempt at weaving a hat.” She held up her art project, but the weave wasn’t tight enough and it almost fell apart.
“But what about when we get back?” he asked.
“Do you always think ten steps ahead?” she asked.
“No.”
But she thought he did. He’d probably had to as a SEAL. “Tell me about one of your missions.”
Stranded with the SEAL Page 4